


Bad Men

by DerelictDigits



Category: Red Dead Redemption
Genre: Angst, Doubts of Sexuality, Dry Humping, Falling In Love, Grinding, M/M, No Spoilers, Time-Appropriate Internalized Homophobia
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-01-06
Updated: 2019-01-06
Packaged: 2019-10-05 13:47:32
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,777
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17326148
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DerelictDigits/pseuds/DerelictDigits
Summary: "I ain't this Mary, you know."Arthur looks to the Western sky and scoffs."I know."





	Bad Men

He stinks like blood and whiskey, always has, even since he was fourteen.

Two weeks into Horseshoe Overlook, a silhouette on horseback melts through the trees, and when John, half-lidded and weary, calls who it is, a gruff voice mumbles back Arthur. Girls huddle close on logs by the campfire, long lashes batting in the flickering light, eyes fixed on how he almost falls off his horse. Karen smiles behind her hand and whispers something to Mary-Beth that he can't and never wants to hear.

Nothing hurts, not really. Not any more than it usually does. Fingers calloused from pulling a trigger all day. Thighs sore from horseback. Tongue dry from smoking cheap, pilfered cigars.

He slips Dutch ten crumpled one-dollar bills by the cooking fire and feels a little like a drunken fool he saw in Valentine trying to buy an evening with a hooker.

"See Strauss." Dutch eyes him up and down and pockets the bills with a nod. Arthur wets his lips. "You been shot."

"S'from yesterday," he says, and coughs. Technically it is. It's well past midnight. The girls are shuffling off to bed yawning as they pass. Little Jack's curled up in his mother's arms on their cots some odd feet away.

"Arthur." He squints at the ex-O'Driscoll slouched near his hitched horse, leaning in close and stroking her mane. A brown racing horse he bought with stolen cash a week ago and stupidly gave the name of Mary. "Arthur."

Dutch's eyes are glowing across the fire, burning like they always do with this faraway whisper of some grandiose dream. He's smart and handsome in all that black, gold, and red.

"Don't be foolish now, son. I don't care when, but see Strauss. We can't afford to lose you to a damn stray bullet. This is it, Arthur." Dutch clasps his shoulder, the one not shot, with a grip that almost hurts just the same. "This is really it this time. I know it."

When he says it like that, Arthur can't help but want to know it, too. Left penniless by the cooking fire, he's dog-tired and bleeding out, though has oddly never felt more alive. The camp rests easy save for Reverend Swanson who stumbles by the other fire, falls, and stays in the dirt, and the underfed man who rustles to his right and whispers sweet-nothings to a whinnying Mary.

"Hey!" Kieran flinches - still can't help it at this point - and freezes like the startled doe shot, skinned, and boiled in the stew they had for dinner. "What're you doin' to my girl?"

The man's on pins and needles and ought to be, two weeks since the Grizzlies, ten days off the tree, nearly gelded. But gang life's in his blood. Every day he stands a little taller.

"Nothin'. Have you been feedin' her?"

"What's that supposed to mean?" Arthur tests, hot-headed for the hell of it.

Kieran doesn't take the bait, not like the duller, bruised excuses for why Arthur's knuckles ache every day. He's smarter than that. It's why he's the only O'Driscoll grunt from the Grizzlies that made it out alive.

"She's thin, see?" He strokes up Mary's neck underhanded, slow. "You should feed her more."

"And what d'you know about horses?" Another veiled threat, one even he doesn't fathom. It's easier to fathom why he hates O'Driscolls in the first place. Anything that hates Dutch, he hates. Simple as that.

"Just what I been taught when I was... Well."

Arthur closes the distance and seizes a thin wrist in a grip too rough. Mary gets agitated at the commotion and tries to pull away from her hitch. "Just what you been taught... You do realize where you are by now, right, boy?"

"Well, 'course I do." Guarded eyes glance down to his shoulder. "I do."

They end up crowded against horse hide, Kieran sandwiched between Arthur and Mary. She whinnies and tosses her head back while Arthur keeps pressing until Kieran starts to squirm.

"You're bleedin', Mr. Morgan," he mentions, uncomfortable, grasping anywhere but his wounded shoulder. Arthur's less pinning him than resting his weight by now, heavy and bogged down with guns. Everything stinks like blood and whiskey, hot and humid in the cool night air.

"This how you O'Driscoll boys like it, huh?" Arthur chuckles through the haze and presses closer, full-bodied. The gun in his front holster jabs at Kieran's bony hip, bullets of his bandolier digging into his neck. "This what they taught you? This what you did to each other up there in them mountains?"

He doesn't mean a word of it past flat intimidation. He sketches Kieran's angry face in his journal that night and wakes up terribly sore with the book wedged between him and his cot. Dark letters in messy cursive read "Got shot, got drunk, got stupid."

* * *

"Take him to Valentine." Bill follows a trail of fresh pig blood like scarlet breadcrumbs to Pearson's table. "Arthur? Did you hear me?"

"Wish I couldn't, Bill."

The hog on Arthur's shoulder is decomposing fast under the heat of the sun, as fast as its former farmhands now fertilizing the land they too were shot on. Arthur doesn't think about them, though. He divorced guilt years ago, or he'd like to, or he wouldn't like to. Instead of deciding which, he hefts the poached pig onto the butchering table and rubs his hands on dirty pants that don't do much to clean them.

" _The O'Driscoll_ ," Bill enunciates, shouldering into view. "Take him."

"And why in God's name would I do a thing like that?"

Because he's long due for a bath and the camp's due for supplies and Bill doesn't trust him to go alone. Because Bill's as loose-screwed as he always was and probably will be 'til death. Arthur doesn't trust him either, and even little Jackie's made a game of throwing pebbles at his head, but he's not so distrustful as to assume the worst of a man who lost everything and is struggling to survive. Though maybe that makes him crazier than Bill.

Kieran's quiet beside him all the way to Valentine, which is just fine as Arthur's sick of small talk. They don't mention anything about that night against Mary. There's just not much to say.

A bounty ninety-dollars long riddled with horse theft, robbery, and murder clings to Arthur like a leech, fattened on the rush of being a bad man. Part of that bounty trots between his legs, a male chestnut horse he's taken to calling Red. Mary's been riddled with bullet holes in a field for five days now, but she was healthy in the time before she died. Arthur decided to feed her more.

It doesn't take long before the O'Driscoll smells like cheap soap and carries himself like he got a little more than just a bath inside that hotel.

"She said I was cute," he brags like a boy down the stairs outside, smiling lopsided for the first time in days. Arthur smiles back and shakes his head, boots coated in mud at the bottom of the stairs.

"Hey! You! Weren't you that feller what shot Leroy?!"

Broad center in the muddy slop of Valentine's streets. Passing folks turn to look. Kieran turns to look. It seems everyone looks except Arthur.

"N-No?" Kieran sounds so unsure Arthur might put a bullet in him, too, for good measure. "You got the wrong guy, mister. Me and... my, my brother here've been out of town for a full month."

"Brother?"

He doesn't like that he's close enough to smell Kieran's clean hair. Doesn't stop to think about why. Doesn't have the time as Kieran throws an arm around his shoulders and turns him to face a rather dull-looking fellow in a shirt that may or may not have once been white.

"Why, yes!" Kieran calls, tugging him close. "How dare you go accusin' an innocent family! I... I reckon that deserves compensation, don't you, brother?"

With Kieran tight against his side, arm loose around his shoulders, Arthur cocks his hip and outright huffs a laugh. He's no Hosea, and dear God, he's no Dutch. It'd be a resounding failure if he was alone; all skin and bones with a dirty look about him even five-minutes fresh out a bath.

But Arthur, broad shoulders framed by a duster and hat tipped low on his brow, stares the accuser down for all of five seconds before nervous hands dig for compensation.

They wring compensation for invasion of privacy out of three more onlookers before some brave soul runs to get the sheriff.

"Not an O'Driscoll, my ass," Arthur mutters on the outskirts of Valentine, clenching three rabbits about the legs in favor of buying meat to lay low from that broad-daylight robbery. There's laughter in his voice, and he's riding the high, in love with the rush of it all, even if the most they lifted was four-dollars and some odd cents. "What the hell was all that?"

"I ain't no O'Driscoll," Kieran corrects by their horses, fingers carding through Red's auburn mane. "But I was."

"Sure as shit was... Scoot."

"Y'all should trust me more. I meant it, you know! When I saved your life." It's not clear to Arthur how a man CAN'T mean to save another man's life. "I don't know who else you think I did that for. Wasn't Colm O'Driscoll, I'll tell you that much."

Hot rabbit blood drips down his fingers and pools around his nails. Kieran steps closer, pushing it.

"Why didn't you just shoot me dead? Leave me up there with all the rest of 'em? Or at Colm's place, after you got what you wanted."

"Oh, there's still plenty time left to shoot you." Arthur can't stand how his eyes are sparkling like Dutch's do when the man believes in something with all his heart. He can't stand the sight. "What the hell are you tryna say here?"

"I meant it." Kieran pushes again, then pushes more until there's not much left to push. He wraps clean fingers around Arthur's fist and gets them stained with blood. "I'd do it again if I had to. Even if I weren't ever captive. Ain't that somethin', Arthur?"

The scent of soap lingers where he stood when he gets nothing but silence and retreats to his own horse, bright-eyed and so obviously in love with the rush of it all that he looks like a man born anew.

Arthur can't stand the sight.

* * *

Delicate soaps get buried in shallow graves at funerals no one attends, which is more than could be said for most men who meet the barrel of a gun in Lemoyne. The boy's sweat and dirt and rank body odor all over again soon enough. They all are. Some more than others.

Soon, he's breathing against another man's neck. Soon, he's carding fingers through Arthur's hair like he does sometimes with his horses, and Arthur's not sure how they got here.

He'd trace back the steps, but he's never been one to dwell on the past, or so he tells himself with a journal chock full of reflections. He tells himself a lot of things these days.

"You ever thought about this?" comes a whisper warm and wet near his ear, chapped lips huffing out breaths like a sinner in church.

"No," he mumbles. "No."

It should be obvious from the hand on his backside, from how Arthur's hauled him in like an undertow, but all Kieran does is moan as if the fib was a kiss on the back of the neck.

"Me neither," he promises, quick and hollow, voice catching on a gasp.

There's jagged tree bark roughing into Arthur's back that he's trying and failing to ignore, a leg anchored behind his for leverage, an ex-O'Driscoll making noises in the back of his throat with every desperate roll of his hips.

Whatever moonlight not strangled by clouds is obscured by trees in the thicket, but even with the sun out, it'd be easy to close his eyes and be with someone else. To conceal the scratch of another man's beard on his cheek is the hard part. No fantasy could disguise the lean muscle under his hands, the lack of curves, of fat. So Arthur doesn't waste time closing his eyes in the first place.

He sighs through his nose and lets his head fall back when Kieran loops arms around his neck and ruts like this is his last chance with any human being, like that maid in the bathhouse never existed.

"Whoever that girl was... She was lyin', ya know." Arthur hitches a thin leg up, remembering the smile on that boyish face. "You ain't cute." He spins them so Kieran's pinned against the tree. "City boys are cute. Girls are cute." A second leg rises to hook around his hip. "You ain't cute."

All Kieran manages is his name, lax, wanton, and offended, a tad too loud when they're still so close to camp. Any other words get muffled by the palm of Arthur's hand. Though they're both drenched in sweat, he presses his nose to Kieran's neck anyway.

There's clothes and guns in the way when he thrusts hard in a rhythm at an angle that leaves them both untouched, but it's close enough to sex that neither of them stop and neither of them dare to reach for anything more.

"C'mon," Kieran starts to mutter against his hand, bouncing between the tree trunk and his lap. "Yeah, yeah, c'mon..."

It's a slow build that never goes anywhere - the most they're both screwing are their own pants - but it's close enough. Like the mangled list of wherever Arthur finds himself these days, he tells himself that it's close enough.

* * *

A follower. A coward. Weak, Arthur'd called him.

Weaker than Dutch's boys. Took off like a kitten with its tail chopped off, fumbling through snow on hands and knees, pleas for mercy puffing out as frost in the winter air.

The lasso yanked him off his horse so fast Arthur thought him dead until he heard the crying. For a man pegged weak, he managed to wrangle out of the bind around his ankles, kicked Arthur in the face, and took off again. Made it less than two feet before falling.

* * *

"Arthur, my very own son!"

"You want somethin', Dutch?"

"Only for you to realize how much you truly mean to me! To _us_ , Arthur."

The five hundred crammed into the lock box is probably why Dutch's voice cracks mid-way through his sentence, why he throws his arms open in the middle of Clemens Point. Still, Arthur accepts his embrace like a little boy hugging his father, or like what they used to be, a twenty year old tucking a fifteen year old lost soul under his wing and never looking back.

A chill numbs his lungs from hunting rabbits in the Grizzlies. The scent of book pages, firewood, and old cigars seems to thaw him from the inside out. His eyes slip closed for a second, maybe less, but the embrace is over before they can open again.

Arthur clears his throat instead of focusing on that something in his chest he doesn't understand and ends up in a coughing fit. That something that feels as if a piece of his heart peeled off onto Dutch when they parted. He supposes he'll leave it there for Dutch to keep.

"You alright, Arthur? You, uh..."

"Hm?" He glances to Kieran by the horses, those wide dark eyes catching the sunlight, eating it up. "Whatchu want?"

"You were just...You were coughin' a bit, is all. You alright?"

"Relax, I ain't dyin'." He waves a hand. "Why you care so much?"

The answer teeters on parted lips. Kieran freezes and stares for too long, longer than only a passing friend would, soft shadows of concern warming his face. Arthur can hardly blame Micah when he walks up and jabs the blunt end of a knife into his ribs.

"You know, Arthur," Micah's voice curls slow as snake while Kieran backpedals, "I've always noticed that treachery-" He digs the handle in. "Has a habit of repeating itself... What do you think about that, our dear little O'Driscoll?"

There's not much Arthur can do when Kieran knocks the knife from Micah's hand and pays with a black eye he'll be regretting for days to come. He backs up and spits blood that stains the grass red while Micah laughs like a mad hyena, and Arthur gets that hollow  _something_ in his chest again, only this time, Dutch is nowhere near him.


End file.
